Synthesis Essay Outline
Thesis: In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, and Night by Elie Wiesel, the virtuous and pure characters, Tom Robinson, Elie, and Hassan are victims of prejudice based on their race, ethnicity, and religion; these “mockingbirds” are robbed of their innocence due to the evil of prejudice.
I.
a. In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Tom Robinson, a well-mannered and kind-hearted colored man, unjustly loses his life because of the strong hold racial prejudice has on his small southern town.
b. Lee depicts Tom as a good, innocent man who goes to church every Sunday and has a wife and kids. However when he is falsely accused of raping a young white woman, he is placed in a life-threatening
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Atticus describes the scene of Tom’s death: “They said if he had two good arms he’d have made it, he was moving that fast. Seventeen bullets in him… I guess Tom was tired of white men’s chances and preferred to take his own,” (Lee 268-269).
d. Tom’s loss of innocence is made obvious when he breaks the rules and tries to escape prison. He is still a good man, though, and was sick “of white men’s chances.” He did not want to rot away in jail as an innocent man waiting for Atticus to free him. He had “seventeen bullets in him;” a merciless murder.
e. His death is compared to the killing of a mockingbird. Early in the book, Atticus cautions his children, “Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird” (Lee 103).
f. Mockingbirds represent those who do not do anything immoral to deserve harsh punishment. Tom Robinson’s death is a “sin.” He did not rape the young white girl, but who would believe a black man’s word over a white woman’s word? The small southern town engulfed by racial prejudice against blacks has “kill[ed] a mockingbird.”
g. Looking back at his trial, the color of his skin was the most convincing evidence to convict him. With seventeen fatal bullets, the mockingbird is
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Before the Nazis, Elie loves his family and is eager to further his studies about the ways of God. However, once he enters the world inside concentration camps his family is quickly separated and he struggles to maintain his devotion to God. The SS officers severely mistreat the Jews and if any step out of line, they are abused and humiliated.
c. When Elie discovers an officer with a young girl in a back room of the warehouse, he is beaten like an animal: “A-7713!’ I stepped forward. ‘A crate!’ he ordered. They brought a crate. ‘Lie down on it! On your belly!’ I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip” (Wiesel 57).
d. Elie’s loss of innocence is displayed when he says, “I no longer felt anything the lashes of the whip.” He admits to not feeling any emotions at all, not even anger or sadness because he knows that it will not relieve him of his distress. The one and all thing he feels is pain. Along with being emotionally broken and physically abused by prejudice, Elie also withstands psychological degradation when he is called “A-7713.” He is immediately branded with these symbols when he first arrives and is made to feel less than human or like he is only a number.
e. The Jewish prisoners are tortured and worked like mules simply because they are Jewish. They have done nothing immoral to receive such treatment and
The concentration camps took all of this away from him. The will to survive overshadowed everything else, pitting man against man, and father against son. Everyday was a fight for survival, and the only person Elie could rely on was himself.
Elie’s experience in Nazi’s camps transformed him totally. Elie had lost a great deal through the war and this changed him dramatically. The wickedness and brutality he witnessed had depressing psychological effect on him that haunted him throughout his life. From being a happy child he had become a sullen young man. The most important change in Elie was the value system that he developed through the
Elie sees his mother and sisters taken away to a crematory, men hanged for little to no reason, was forcibly whipped for defending another prisoner, and forced on a death march where he experienced many horrific things: he was almost killed over a small chunk of bread, his father almost died, he
In this book you will see a lot of people being killed off or simply just being torn away from their everyday lives and beliefs. Elie and his family got taken into a concentration camp. When they arrived his family was taken away from him and they were not seen again. After that, his father and himself were left to fend for themselves. There were a lot of people in charge at the camps.
Wiesel’s passionate response in this quote shows how much has changed for him since the beginning of his story, “Behind me, I heard the same man asking: "For God's sake, where is God?" And from within me, I heard a voice answer: "Where He is? This is where—hanging here from this gallows… " (Wiesel, 35). After the hanging of an innocent young boy, in a moment of despair, Elie’s subconscious answers to a question that he’s been asking himself ever since his journey of terror began. Elie resolves that the torture and dehumanization around him is a message of silence from God.
Elie’s placid life changes quickly as the Germans begin to persecute Jews in other towns around his hometown. Many people around Elie continue to deny that these horrific events are reality, which certainly leads to confusion and shock when German officers appear in town and begin to organize the formation and construction of
When Elie is sent to concentration camp, he goes through a lot of emotions. At first he is in denial that human beings could do such cruel things to other people. This stage however is short lived because very suddenly he must adapt to the harsh environment around him. Although eventually the atmosphere takes him over.
The cruelty of the German officers at the concentration camps change Elie’s personality throughout the novel. At the beginning of the novel, Elie is deeply religious and spends most of his time studying Judaism. However, by the end of the novel, Elie believes that God has been unjust to him and all the other Jews, and has lost most of his faith. The cruelty of the German officers also changed the other Jews as well. The events of the Holocaust forces the prisoners to fend for themselves, and not help others.
The Nazi’s have demolished both Elie’s physical and mental health. Elie has been deprived of food, water, shelter, warmth, comfort; He is given next to nothing. He has been whipped, beaten, and broken. The S.S. officers have succeeded at beaten the belief in God in him. It takes a great deal of oppression to suppress one’s religious beliefs and the Nazis were able to do so.
Elie became independent from God and refused to view him as omnipotent, and therefore, Elie and the other inmates believed that“ [they] were masters of nature, masters of the world” (87). With the daunting experience that Elie had undergone, he felt that the camps had utterly devoured his identity and his soul, but because he suffered blisteringly and managed to abide, even if “ [he] was nothing but ashes now, [he] felt [himself] to be stronger than this Almighty to whom [his] life had been bound for so long” (68). Although Elie was at last, liberated from the concentration camp, the rigorous conditions and brutal treatments from the camps has weakened him physically, mentally, and spiritually. Elie, bereft of his faith and soul, looked into mirror for the first time after his liberation, and “from the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating him” (115). Through tormenting sufferings and witnessing the mortifying decimation in the Holocaust, Elie’s faith is eventually dismantled
Lee uses Miss Gates’s ironic views of Hitler and Tom’s trial to show how racial prejudice causes crimes against African Americans to be considered less than crimes committed against white people. A mockingbird is then used to symbolize Tom Robinson as an innocent person wrongly convicted of a crime because of his skin color. The misunderstood characterization of Arthur Radley shows how society will let prejudice guide their imaginated view on the lives of people they don't understand. All three characters provide examples of how a preconceived opinion of one person or a whole race can cause drastic misunderstandings and
Although all the evidence pointed to Tom Robinson being innocent and the only witnesses were from unreliable and changing sources he was still convicted. This is a depiction of the death of a Mockingbird, ultimately destroying innocence and purity that resided with Tom Robinson that died when he was shot as he tried to flee from his inescapable doom. Mr. Underwood, the publisher of Maycomb 's newspaper as well as a respected all of Atticus, sadly compares Tom 's death to “the senseless slaughter of songbirds...” (pg.244) stating another reference to the ever-present mockingbird
Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. ”(Lee,page 103). In To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel by Harper Lee, the main focus on the book is to show various forms of discrimination, narrated by a young Scout Finch. The main point of the book is to portray what life was like in the 1930s for people of all social classes, and show how people were treated differently for things that were not under their control. To Kill a Mockingbird is about an unfair trial that occured in the 1930’s on a black man named Tom Robinson that was under the impression that he had raped a white girl, while it was all consensual, the trial occurred due to the stigma of a black man and a white woman in a relationship.
In our society, innocent people, known as mockingbirds, experience prejudice in their lives. A/T: In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Background: Tom Robinson is a black person who’s was accused of raping a white girl named Mayella Ewell which he has never done. For this reason, Atticus Finch was appointed to be his lawyer. As a result, Atticus takes a stand for him by approving his case and standing up for him, but Tom was still found guilty.
A mockingbird is a harmless songbird that offers only its beautiful voice. To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming of age novel written by Harper Lee. This story took place in a small rural town called Maycomb County, in the 1930’s where everyone knew each other and all the townspeople were infected by a disease called gossip. This gossip harmed the “mockingbirds”, because all of them were “shot down” physically and metaphorically. Harper Lee implied that there were distinct characteristics that parallel mockingbirds.